30.Literature review of works by J.D. Salinger, John Steinbeck, J. Updike
Plan:
1.
American literature in the 1940-50-s. J.D. Salinger
2.
John Steinbeck
3.
J. Updike
Key words: Great Depression, post-World War II generation, “A Perfect Day for
Bananafish”, East of Eden, The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures
1.American literature in the 1940-50-s. J.D. Salinger
The Great Depression was a time of economic down turn, which started after
the stock market crash on Black Tuesday. It began in the United States and quickly
spread to Europe and every part of the world, with devastating effects in both then
industrialized countries and those which exported raw materials. The U.S.
Depression has been the subject of much writing, as the country has sought to
reevaluate an era that dumped financial as well as emotional catastrophe on its
people.
J.D. Salinger, in full Jerome David Salinger, (born January 1, 1919, New
York,
New York, U.S.—died January 27, 2010, Cornish, New Hampshire),
American writer whose novel The Catcher in the Rye (1951) won critical acclaim and
devoted admirers, especially among the post-World War II generation of college
students. His corpus of published works also consists of short stories that were
printed in magazines, including the The Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, and The New
Yorker.
Salinger was the son of a Jewish father and a Christian mother, and,
like Holden Caulfield, the hero of The Catcher in the Rye, he grew up in New York City,
attending public schools and a military academy. After brief periods at New York
and Columbia universities, he devoted himself entirely to writing, and his stories
began to appear in periodicals in 1940. After Salinger’s return from service in the
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U.S. Army (1942–46), his name and writing style became increasingly associated
with The New Yorker magazine, which published almost all of his later stories. Some
of the best of these made use of his wartime experiences: “For Esmé—with Love
and Squalor” (1950) describes a U.S. soldier’s poignant encounter with two British
children; “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” (1948) concerns the suicide of the
sensitive, despairing veteran Seymour Glass.
Major critical and popular recognition came with the publication of The
Catcher in the Rye, whose central character, a sensitive, rebellious adolescent,
relates in authentic teenage idiom his flight from the “phony” adult world, his search
for innocence and truth, and his final collapse on a psychiatrist’s couch. The
humour and colourful language of The Catcher in the Rye place it in the tradition
of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and the stories of Ring Lardner, but its hero,
like most of Salinger’s child characters, views his life with an added dimension
of precocious self-consciousness. Nine Stories (1953), a selection of Salinger’s short
stories, added to his reputation. Several of his published pieces feature the siblings
of the fictional Glass family, beginning with Seymour’s appearance in “A Perfect
Day for Bananafish.” In works such as Franny and Zooey (1961) and Raise High the
Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963), the introspective
Glass children, influenced by their eldest brother and his death, navigate questions
about spirituality and enlightenment.
The reclusive habits of Salinger in his later years made his personal life a
matter of speculation among devotees, and his small literary output was a subject
of controversy among critics. The last work Salinger published during his lifetime
was a novella titled Hapworth 16, 1924, which appeared in The New Yorker in
1965. In 1974 The Complete Uncollected Short Stories of J.D. Salinger, an
unauthorized two-volume work of his early pieces, was briefly released to the
public, but sales were halted when Salinger filed a lawsuit
for copyright infringement.
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2.John Steinbeck
John Steinbeck, in full John Ernst Steinbeck, (born February 27,
1902, Salinas, California, U.S.—died December 20, 1968, New York, New York),
American novelist, best known for The Grapes of Wrath (1939), which summed up
the bitterness of the Great Depression decade and aroused widespread sympathy for the
plight of migratory farmworkers. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature for
1962.
Steinbeck attended Stanford University, Stanford, California, intermittently
between 1920 and 1926 but did not take a degree. Before his books attained
success, he spent considerable time supporting himself as a manual labourer while
writing, and his experiences lent authenticity to his depictions of the lives of the
workers in his stories. He spent much of his life in Monterey county, California,
which later was the setting of some of his fiction.
Steinbeck’s first novel, Cup of Gold (1929), was followed by The Pastures of
Heaven (1932) and To a God Unknown (1933), none of which were successful. He
first achieved popularity with Tortilla Flat (1935), an affectionately told story of
Mexican Americans. The mood of gentle humour turned to one of unrelenting
grimness in his next novel, In Dubious Battle (1936), a classic account of a strike by
agricultural labourers and a pair of Marxist labour organizers who engineer it.
The novella Of Mice and Men (1937), which also appeared in play and film versions, is
a tragic story about the strange, complex bond between two migrant labourers. The
Grapes of Wrath won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award and was made into a
notable film in
1940. The novel is about the migration of a dispossessed family from
the Oklahoma Dust Bowl to California and describes their subsequent exploitation by
a ruthless system of agricultural economics.
After the best-selling success of The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck went to
Mexico to collect marine life with the freelance biologist Edward F. Ricketts, and
the two men collaborated in writing Sea of Cortez (1941), a study of the fauna of
the Gulf of California. During World War II Steinbeck wrote some effective pieces of
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government propaganda, among them The Moon Is Down (1942), a novel of
Norwegians under the Nazis, and he also served as a war correspondent. His
immediate postwar work—Cannery Row (1945), The Pearl (1947), and The Wayward
Bus (1947)—contained the familiar elements of his social criticism but were more
relaxed in approach and sentimental in tone.
Steinbeck’s later writings—which include Travels with Charley: In Search of
America (1962), about Steinbeck’s experiences as he drove across the United
States—were interspersed with three conscientious attempts to reassert his stature as
a major novelist: Burning Bright (1950), East of Eden (1952), and The Winter of Our
Discontent (1961). In critical opinion, none equaled his earlier achievement. East
of Eden, an ambitious epic about the moral relations between a California farmer
and his two sons, was made into a film in 1955. Steinbeck himself wrote the scripts
for the film versions of his stories The Pearl (1948) and The Red Pony (1949).
Outstanding among the scripts he wrote directly for motion pictures
were Forgotten Village (1941) and Viva Zapata! (1952).
Steinbeck’s reputation rests mostly on the naturalistic novels with proletarian
themes he wrote in the 1930s; it is in these works that his building of rich symbolic
structures and his attempts at conveying mythopoeic and archetypal qualities in his
characters are most effective.
3. John Updike
John Updike, in full John Hoyer Updike, (born March 18,
1932, Reading, Pennsylvania, U.S.—died January 27, 2009, Danvers, Massachusetts),
American writer of novels, short stories, and poetry, known for his careful
craftsmanship and realistic but subtle depiction of “American, Protestant, smalltown, middle-class” life.
Updike grew up in Shillington, Pennsylvania, and many of his early stories
draw on his youthful experiences there. He graduated from Harvard University in
1954. In 1955 he began an association with The New Yorker magazine, to which he
contributed editorials, poetry, stories, and criticism throughout his prolific career. His
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poetry—intellectual, witty pieces on the absurdities of modern life—was gathered
in his first book, The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures (1958), which
was followed by his first novel, The Poorhouse Fair (1958).
About this time, Updike devoted himself to writing fiction full-time, and
several works followed. Rabbit, Run (1960), which is considered to be one of his
best novels, concerns a former star athlete who is unable to recapture success when
bound by marriage and small-town life and flees responsibility. Three subsequent
novels, Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981), and Rabbit at Rest (1990)—the
latter two winning Pulitzer Prizes—follow the same character during later periods of
his life. Rabbit Remembered (2001) returns to characters from those books in the
wake of Rabbit’s death. The Centaur (1963) and Of the Farm (1965) are notable
among Updike’s novels set in Pennsylvania. Much of Updike’s later fiction is set
in New England (in Ipswich, Massachusetts), where he lived from the 1960s. Updike
continued to explore the issues that confront middle-class America, such
as fidelity, religion, and responsibility. The novels Couples (1968) and Marry
Me (1976) expose the evolving sexual politics of the time in East Coast suburbia.
Updike set Memories of the Ford Administration: A Novel (1992) in the 1970s,
infusing the tale of a professor’s research on President James Buchanan with
observations on sexuality. In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996) draws parallels
between religion and popular obsession with cinema, while Gertrude and
Claudius (2000) offers conjectures on the early relationship between Hamlet’s
mother and her brother-in-law. In response to the cultural shifts that occurred in the
United States after the September 11 attacks, Updike released Terrorist in 2006.
Updike often expounded upon characters from earlier novels, eliding decades
of their lives only to place them in the middle of new adventures. The Witches of
Eastwick (1984; filmed 1987), about a coven of witches, was followed by The
Widows of Eastwick (2008), which trails the women into old age. Bech: A
Book (1970), Bech Is Back (1982), and Bech at Bay (1998) humorously trace the
tribulations of a Jewish writer.
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Updike’s several collections of short stories included The Same
Door (1959), Pigeon Feathers (1962), Museums and
Women (1972), Problems (1979), Trust Me (1987), and My Father’s Tears, and
Other Stories (2009), which was published posthumously. A substantial portion of
his short fiction oeuvre was published as the two-volume John Updike: The
Collected Stories (2013). He also wrote nonfiction and criticism, much of it
appearing in The New Yorker. It has been collected in Assorted
Prose (1965), Picked-Up Pieces (1975), Hugging the Shore (1983), and Odd
Jobs (1991). Essays examining art and its cultural presentation were featured
in Just Looking: Essays on Art (1989), Still Looking: Essays on American
Art (2005), and Always Looking: Essays on Art (2012). Due Considerations (2007)
collects commentary spanning art, sexuality, and literature.
Updike also continued to write poetry, usually light verse. Endpoint, and Other
Poems, published posthumously in 2009, collects poetry Updike had written
between 2002 and a few weeks before he died; it takes his own death as its primary
subject. Selected Poems (2015) broadly surveys his poetic career. Higher Gossip, a
collection of commentaries, was released in 2011.
Questions
1.How Salingers wartime experience influenced to his novels?
2.What are the most famous works of John Steinbeck?
3. What are the works of John Updike and what did he describe in them?
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